What Decadence taught me about building a safety app nobody asked for

I watched a VIP structure sway under crowd weight at Decadence.

Not creak. Sway.

For maybe three seconds I ran the math on what happens if that thing tips. How many people are under it. How many of them are with someone who would know where to look for them afterwards.

Nothing happened. The crowd moved. The structure held.

But I have been building something different since that night.

Where the product started

RaveDaddy started as a festival tool. Find your people when the stage gets loud, the cell signal drops, and your group scatters three directions. Useful. Niche. A solid side project for a former raver who still ended up at enough festivals a year to remember what it feels like to lose your friends in a 40,000-person crowd.

The niche framing was easy to sell to myself. I knew the audience because I had been the audience. Every feature made sense against one archetype: a group of five people who got separated at a festival and wanted to find each other fast.

Where the product needed to go

That moment at Decadence showed me the ceiling on the niche framing.

The real product needed to work in any crowd big enough that getting separated from your people becomes a real safety problem. A festival is one version of that crowd. A protest is another. An evacuation is another. A pilgrimage. A city you landed in an hour ago and do not speak the language of.

The person who needs the product is not shopping for a safety app. They are trying to figure out how their existing group text works when nobody is typing back.

Once I wrote that sentence down, the niche framing was dead.

The rebuild

So we rebuilt it. Same team of two. Broader mission. New name.

BuddySOS.

It still finds your people in a crowd. It just does not care whether the crowd is a festival, a protest, an evacuation, a pilgrimage, or a city you landed in an hour ago and do not speak the language of.

The three-second lesson at Decadence was worth more than a year of product strategy sessions. The structure held. But I don't want to be the person who finds out what happens the next time it doesn't.

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Keep reading: The next essay digs into why most safety apps get marketed to the wrong people and how that shaped the BuddySOS rebuild. If you want the product side, the BuddySOS landing page explains how it works in practice, or you can read more about the studio behind it.